White Paper - Risk Identification in Public Contracts: the role of Generative AI and the Company Analysis Tool

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed major weaknesses in the UK’s public procurement system, leading to billions being lost through fraud, inefficiency, and poorly executed contracts. In response, Rachel Reeves announced the appointment of a COVID corruption tsar and launched investigations into £600m worth of COVID contracts.

Both Butterfly Data, and our partner Oxford Insights, recognise that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning hold significant potential to both identify and recover these losses.

Indeed, seven EU countries are already employing AI to analyse procurement data or assist with tender processes, with 10 more planning to adopt similar tools. However, more needs to be done to create practical, actionable use cases in this space.

That’s why we acted to develop the Company Analysis Tool (CAT) - an idea conceived and realised through Oxford Insights' and Butterfly Data's expertise.

By combining UK contracting data from Companies House and Contracts Finder with proven ‘red flag’ methodologies, the CAT summarises any potential risks associated with contracting a given company. Enhanced with Large Language Model (LLM) technology, it also synthesises contextual insights from news articles and Wikipedia. Importantly, CAT has been designed as an ethical tool which is transparent about how data is sourced and respects copyright law.

In our new white paper, Risk Identification in Public Contracts: the role of Generative AI and the Company Analysis Tool, we explain how CAT works and outline its potential to help governments identify companies for manual investigation. You can download the paper here.

Looking ahead, we are committed to further developing the Company Analysis Tool by integrating a broader range of data sources, enhancing its architecture to handle larger and more complex datasets, and exploring machine learning to detect suspicious patterns.

By working closely with government and civil society stakeholders, we aim to ensure the CAT becomes a practical solution to address real-world challenges in public procurement.

Ongoing feedback and testing will be essential to its success - please get in touch if you’d like to contribute!